I used to be a really good writer.

I loved to write. Short stories, ttrpg adventures, poems, diaries, letters. I just love filling a blank space with my own thoughts and feelings, whether or not they're going to matter to anybody else.

But also, I used to be good.

People complimented my writing. I thrive on validation and it felt nice to see something creative of mine be released into the world and have people react to it, converse about it. It felt good to be a part of a larger conversation just on the merit of things I had to say and the way that I said them. And yeah, if I made money or got to direct attention to things I cared about along the way, that was awesome too. Mostly, though, I just loved being noticed and liked for doing a thing I was enjoying doing.

then I stopped.

I would love to say I don't know what happened, but in reality I do. I know exactly what happened. I let the rest of life swallow up the things that I care about and silence my own inner voice. There are a lot of reasons for that--writing and reflecting helped me discover my queer identity, which was incredible and important but also brought about a ton of turbulent changes in my life--divorce, career change, massive renegotiation of all of my various personal relationships--and that's only the things in my personal sphere, having nothing to do with the absolute fuckfest of a world we've been enduring for the past decade or more.

It's a lot harder to take time to put things onto a page now. I'm disabled--chronic migraines steal my time and my energy, preventing me from doing the things I love with the people I love. My own faith remains, but religious trauma from my own reflections and from watching my trans son experience rejection from family who use religion as a weapon against a child they claim to love has made it really hard to interact with my relationship with God--and I used to write so much about my faith and what it meant to me.

I feel like I spend every waking moment either aggressively trying to do things that are productive because I don't know when I'll have the energy to do those things again, or draped across my mattress like a bedridden Victorian woman, filling my time with nonsense because it's the only thing I'm capable of doing while my brain is filled with spiders, fog, and pain.

I tried starting a blog recently. A real blog with a theme that I care about and things that I want to say. I wrote exactly one post and then got overwhelmed. I look back and it and want to write more, but am crushed by the awkwardness that I am holding over myself (and nobody else cares about), explaining why I wrote one thing and then disappeared for months despite promising I was going to write again.

So I guess this, right here, is an attempt to start writing again. It's not going to be good, or have a theme, or be consistent, or anything like that. It's going to be aggressively personal in whatever ways I think are safe to put on the internet. I'm gonna ramble about bullshit nobody cares about, mostly my own brain, because if I don't start letting that inner voice out again I'm scared that it will disappear forever. I might post six completely unrelated rants in one day and then not come back for six months, or I may settle into a weekly habit, or something in between (probably something in between).

I just need to remember the simple joy of putting words into the world again, and love doing it because I can do it, not because of anything external to me.

But maybe, if you want, you can listen in. and maybe you'll find something that you can relate to. And maybe I'll be a part of a larger conversation again, and feel more connected to a world I walled off of myself for nearly a decade while I was busy figuring out how to exist after resetting my entire life.

I don't know. But it feels good to type again, and hitting enter is going to be nice, especially when I remember that this doesn't have to be good or interesting or readable to anyone else.

It just has to exist.

So here it is.